Friday, October 29, 2004

Someone could do a whole blog just listing Rove's dirty tricks in the current American election, with the worst probably the legal challenges to come after the election. I'm not referring to tricks like misrepresentation in the controlled media, the Sinclair kerfuffle, misleading ads, or the whole swift boat vets fiasco. I mean out and out vote fraud. It's not fair to say that the United States has descended to banana republic status in the crookedness of its election, as there is no banana republic capable of the range and audacity of Rove's schemes (hereisjustarandomvariedsamplingofsomeofwhatisalreadyknown, with much of the worst probably still not even reported, and the greatest fraud, inside the fixed computer voting machines, impossible to detect). The fraudulence of the election should become the main substantive issue in the election. The election has essentially turned into a referendum on whether the United States will become a dictatorship, or remain a (shaky) democracy. Recently, in places like Spain and Venezuela, where criminal oligarchs attempted to manipulate democratic results, the voters actually became insulted and angry at the way their democracy was mistreated, and voted to punish the crooks. I would hope that even honest Republicans would hesitate to cast a vote which endorses systematic disenfranchisement on a scale which makes a mockery of the concept of democracy. Sadly, I am not at all comfortable that Americans are capable of realizing what is going on, or are even all that opposed to living under a dictator. Dictators remove the necessity to make choices, and American brains seem to hurt too much to want to think enough to choose. A dictatorship would be so much easier. Countries have fallen into dictatorship before, so the American story would not be without precedent. The problem is that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to regain a lost democracy. Lots and lots of people generally have to die before you get it back.